Gaming Goals for the New Year

As a young business, we’re constantly making, evaluating, and updating our goals, and the New Year is as good a time as any to reflect on our goals and our methods.

2015 RPG Development Accomplishments

Last year was a great year for Varza. Legendary RPG has been in the making for 3 years, but 2015 was the year we kicked into high gear:

We play tested Legendary extensively with friends and strangers, in homes and at conventions, with veteran RPG players and novices

We went through 3 major iterations of the rules covering pretty much all the stats

We went through 2 iterations of a character sheet that not only helps you keep track of points spent, but provides you with all of the stat descriptions inside the app itself

We started Varza games and built our website

Talking with artists and illustrators

Our Facebook community started growing by hundreds per week

2015 Learning

We’ve also met several of our goals for learning and improving.

Connecting with other RPG designers and publishers at conventions and on social media

Reading The Willpower Instinct – love this book on boosting productivity! Some take aways: the power of starting small daily goals rather than starting big, the importance of key habits like getting sufficient sleep, exercise, and meditation, and the important distinctions between anticipating rewards and actually receiving them.

Reading Hamlet’s Hitpoints – a fascinating, scene based analysis of what keeps an audience engaged in 3 classic tales. Take aways: some ideas for a story planning app for game masters!

2016 RPG Development Goals

We’ve got ambitious goals for the next year to keep up our momentum:

Release an app called ‘The Deal’ based on a Legendary-lite rules system. The Deal is designed to be played from character creation to finish in a couple of hours, and make it easy for new roleplayers and game masters to try out roleplaying

Updating the Legendary RPG rules, including streamlining the customization of powers

Prepping for a Legendary RPG Kickstarter mid-year, and for publishing the Legendary RPG core book!

Just like a Kickstarter, we’ve got a few stretch goals, including more app development:

Improvements to the character app that make playing easier: better hints and guides for play, a stat-aware, in-app die roller, quick total armor and attack stats